The ubiquitous gaze of the statue of Hercules over all of Kassel seems to be caught up in a mood of deep contemplation. No one can guess the thoughts and fantasies of this mythical macho superhero. Is he thinking of his glorious past in the South or contemplating the future in the North? The Herculean ambivalence is as emblematic in his muscular posture as in his actions. The guilty laborer of the cave of the Lernean Hydra, the cosmopolitan colonizer of the Amazons of Phrygia, the tolerant crossdresser in Omphale’s palace, and the story goes on … What would this Hercules think if he had to contemplate the present? Would he be questioning the relationship between his birthplace and his adopted country?

Before answering too quickly let’s remember that nowadays it is easy to surrender to a nostalgic past or an unattainable future. Our mind is conquered by these two mental hegemonies. The PAST and the FUTURE are the milk and honey of contemporary intellectuals who are obsessed with re-interpreting the former and re-inventing the latter.

Consequently the PRESENT has become a happy fiction. This is why we need a pragmatic and practical plan for self-actualization in such a way that the “physical,” “spiritual,” and “social” will be truly and triumphantly unified. These three golden functions are the foundations for an individual to live. This is the splendid right now!

An attempt to reclaim these three golden functions is the annual Eternal Internet Brotherhood/Sisterhood, joyful temporary gatherings in different places: Anafi, Las Posas, the Dead Sea, Castello di Fosdinovo, Sigiriya.

This year’s Eternal Internet Brotherhood/Sisterhood will take place in the Dörnberg Nature Reserve just outside of the city of Kassel during the first week of May 2017. Surrounded by beautiful rock formations, this area has been historically regarded as the sacred heartland of Germany. A place of pilgrimage in prehistoric Celtic times, but also a meeting place of Romantic poets during the 19th century for the revival of an “indigenous” German culture.

In this setting, different scenarios of the physical, spiritual, and social ascend. Experiences are shared collectively and mutually with the highest levels of autonomy. We take local knowledge into account, interfering with our esoteric impulses, expressed in immediate actions and gestures.

The gathering elaborates on themes such as pagan and primitive philosophies, open-source communalism, geomantic rituals and solar enchantments, transgender occultism, and noospheric naturalness.

We perform Sisterhood Commemorations, Ceremonies of Friendship, and Monumentalization of Otherness for a whole week.

Stay tuned: we will convey several stories concurrently.

Andreas Angelidakis

Lighting for the Noospheric Society night at the Lesbensbogen commune in Dornberg

The Final Countdown: The Eternal Internet Brotherhood/Sisterhood 6 by Steph Kretowicz

In a paint-by-numbers portrait of the sixth Eternal Internet Brotherhood/Sisterhood, my second, there’s not much to draw from but 19 audio recordings, some of them useful, the rest of them not. There were six of us present, seven got invited; one didn’t come. That’s six, plus Andreas and Angelo, equals eight. Two of us had been to the Brotherhood twice, me and Imaad. For Luca, this was his third time. Three people –Angelo, Andreas and Luca – I’d met first in Israel. That was 2014, three years ago. Caspar is one person I knew already from London, which is the number of people who were in my room (just me). The rest of the brotherhood had two, except Kolbeinn. Imaad and Luca, Angelo and Andreas, and Caspar with Miriam whose phone number I have now, plus Angelo’s.

There were five Hessen-based communes involved – Lossehof e.V., Lesbensbogen eG, Villa Locomuna, Gastwerke e.V., Kommune Niederkaufungen – three of which I remember. Two is the number of times I missed out on the Inner-Outer commune initiation ceremony (my back hurt). First, Villa Locomuna came to us to show us in Lebensbogen guesthouse – two circles split into pairs that moved around in a ring. Second, it was at Angelo’s Noospheric Society programme, on the fifth day of the Brotherhood, the first time it was open to the public in its five years running, and its last official day. Ten seconds is the length the gong that signalled ‘stop’ at the Inner-Outer circle would resonate.

Not enough is how much I slept. Eight in the morning till nine was breakfast and the food that was there never varied. Two hours is how long I napped when I missed the drive to Locomuna in Kassel. I thought it was twelve but turns out 11, and one pm is how late I got there. A lot is how much I was working.

Angelo recorded his reading at Locomuna two times, joking and singing and reading poetry about bailouts and finance into a megaphone. Never is when Kolbein was taught the piano but he learnt in his dreams and played it a lot. Zero, is the number of times I sang or performed at Imaad’s requests, which were countless. I read for the programme once and it felt like many minutes before the audio would work. Lupo the dog ignored me repeatedly; even more is how much I tried to get his attention.

Eight flaccid ‘speaking knives’ and five phones were photographed for Miriam’s performance at the top of the Hercules Monument. The level of recorded and re-corded reality in that project is threefold. It was staged two times. That’s also how much Caspar read – two poems in three places, two-times-two-times-two. The first time was at Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, outside the tiny Aristotle Cubby House in the forest that was open for the first time in years, another while leaning on a mossy pyramid. Seven of us stood with our backs to it and looked up. The third time was at the Noospheric Society programme. One of the same poems was read there for the second time, as well as a new one.

Seven is the number of people in the car, driving from Kassel and listening to the ‘Winner Takes It All,’ presented by Andreas, and written by ABBA after Bjorn and Agnetha divorced, dividing their millions. Three was how many men were in Kolbeinn’s homemade sauna – a plastic tent, pitched in the cold with portable cooking stoves – when I walked past late at night. I recorded their throat singing on my phone for exactly 52 seconds.

Two is how many numbers the school that we went to were needed to make their binary clock – zeros and ones. The school student talking about how it works was exactly half my age, and explaining it using five fingers. I understood very little.

Zero is the number of times I’ve been to documenta. Three people I know who have been to the fourteenth edition saw me in Angelo’s installation, and several is an estimate of how many photos they sent. Six is how many Brotherhood/Sisterhoods residencies have happened. I hope that this won’t be the last.

KABUR FB LIVE by Imaad Majeed
part of the Noospheric Society, Dornberg
Documenta 14 Public Programs hosted by the Eternal internet Brotherhood/Sisterhood

Read Imaad’s reflection

Relearning How To Breathe

A reflection of negotiation, pacing and step

I was invited by the Eternal Internet Brotherhood/Sisterhood, a project of documenta 14. Thanks to the Goethe Institut of Sri Lanka, I was able to partake in a nomadic artist residency on the outskirts of Kassel, Germany.

The Parliament of Bodies public programme of Documenta 14 is what we fell under, and I was particularly pleased to have been engaged by eminent artists in the world at large. From Franco Berardi’s plea to the artist, for philosophers to dutifully to interpret reality and poets to express it, to Bolivia’s Maria Galindo’s urgent request to refuse the role of victim and take on the task of creating new knowlesge, there was much to absorb and to recontextualize within my practice in Sri Lanka.

During our stay, we were immersed in a commune that is situated in Zirenberg, about 20 kilometers outside of the city, where the Fridericeanium turned out to be. The experience of the commune itself was quite an eye-opener, as we learnt about the many ways in which they negotiate the space among themselves. There is the public, there is the private, and then, there is the temporary autonomous zone that the activity of being a commune produces. And, within this, we were able to produce new knowledge, perhaps, I beg to posit. At least, conceptually, there was a particular modality of synthesis that was at play.

The lead up to our initiation of The Noospheric Society, a night part of the d14 programme at the commune, was a process of negotiation between the individual and that space, or spaces, that emerged from our interactions. How and when do we produce new concepts, new stories, new lenses into the micronarratives that are plenitude among us, allowing to instinct the agency of stitching together a cohesive metanarrative for the audience to participate in.

The actual initiation and experience there of was transdisciplinary, and it took shape in quite a beautiful array of spectacle, ritual and becoming. One did feel a sense of belonging to the group, though the role of the individual was apparent, too. It seemed to spawn sporadically, over the course of its parsing together, but could be experienced in different ways that managed to overlap and swim together through a causal ocean of potentialities. So to speak.

What I took back from it was a sense of needing to relearn how to breathe, particularly prompted by Franco Berardi’s contribution to the Parliament of Bodies public programme: the duty of the philosopher to interpret reality, and, of the poet, to express that reality. Since documenta, Dornberg, the Eternal Internet Brotherhood/Sisterhood, I’ve felt more affirmed in my instinct, and this has enabled me to open up to sensitivities of non-thinking, seeking the light and knowing the shade.

Where I am now involves learning how to negotiate the role of being an artist and acting as a curator, and vice versa, at a curatorial intensive residency in Delhi. The KHOJ has somehow decided that I ought to amongst fellow curators of the region which I supposedly represent. As a poet who deals with the referential mode, this is a particularly tenuous ground to step upon. So,

as I take a deep breath, I think back and connect the constellation of potentialities that were activated within the dialectic of North and South Europe, the other and the self, the spectacle and the ritual, the becoming, the being and the actualized, and I exhale, slowly, pacing myself for the oncoming, the ever-being, the constantly coming into, drawing out from and the non-space: where non-art begs to the be experienced, in order for art to be.

nodes is a treeplanter’s research investigating intersecting aspects of nature and technology. The project was initiated in Madrid and continued in Casablanca in September 2016 . The fifth edition of the #ETINTERBRO in October 2016 in Sri Lanka connected the island country of South Asia to this networked environmental data archive. Intermedia documents are built from the archive of a wireless weather station. Climate variations are sonified. Photographed rhytidome becomes source material for computer assembled bark-textured frescos. A discussion on altered ways of hearing leads to the generative possibilities of visual programming language. A repeated headstand, upside down with the head in rock or sand, the body is integrated, connected to the environment as an external drive would be ready for geological data transfer. An encyclopedia on medicinal plants of Ceylon is found, the illustrations assembled, species reconfigured to grow renewed biomimetic imagination to feed our technocentric vision of nature. The next node of the project will be Montreal where the icy winter will serve as a intermedia canvas to environmental data.

Ylva Ogland (SE) is on the Golden Carpet, interviewed and invited for the 4th Eternal Internet Brother/Sisterhood, at Castello Malaspina, Fosdinovo, July 2015.

Transcript:

Angelo: Whatâ€™s your alter ego?

Ylva: My alter ego is Snofrid. It means peacefull snow and she lives in the mirror world behind the Oracle, that is a mirror.

Angelo: Whats the oracle Snofrid for the Eternal Internet Brother/Sisterhood?

Ylva: I think the Oracle for the Eternal Internet Brother/Sisterhood is the Motherhood. Because of what we have done here, a ritual with Snofrid materialized inside the distillate of Athens, New York and Belgium (Ghent), with crashed rubies and stones from Parthenon, and mixed in a blend with Corradoâ€™s breast milk, that comes from Maddalena, who is the mother of Castello Malaspina.

BC: No idea! Same same, but different? 🙂 On the other hand, i think that the way we look at art, or the reasons why we do it, will be quite similar in 2050, nevermind if images, sounds and forms in space will have a concrete or more immaterial body. Art can be a life saver, as well as a free space for thought and practice and knowledge, and i think it will keep on being so.

AP: Whatâ€™s the most interesting thing about our era now?

One of the things that every era tries to do is to define itself as such, possibly to find a place in time. we came up with Anthropocene, lately. Recently, iâ€™ve been re-reading many tetxs and poems by italian women artists from the Sixties, like Ketty La Rocca from Gruppo 70 in Florence, who were trying to come to terms with the new â€œtechnological languageâ€ of the society of spectacle, mass media and mass information. Fascinating. Maybe we are still witnessing the developments of what Dick Higgins called â€œintermediaâ€ in 1966. Intermediatic empathy is what i find quite interesting, now. how about you?

To Conjure forth and Internalize SnÃ¶frid into the systems of those present.

(On the occasion of the 4th Eternal Internet Brother/Sisterhood by Angelo Plessas)

The rituals were divided in three parts, in consecutive order.

Part one â€“ The Act of Preparation at the Castello. Making of the Xenia masks for the initiated, and the table pictogram painting. Collecting symbolic items from the Castello to serve the rituals.

Part two â€“ The Act of Conjuring Forth SnÃ¶frid and of initiation with MC Angelo. Getting the blend of SnÃ¶fridâ€™s distillate and Corradoâ€™s breast-milk internalized into the systems of bodies and souls of those present in the great hall at the Castello.

Part three – The Act of Dining SnÃ¶frid. Materialized by Mirella (the cook) into this world, served on the red pictogram in the dining hall, and consumed by the initiated wearing Xenia masks.

* â€œSnÃ¶fridâ€ is an Old Norse name meaning Snow Peace. She is my mirror twin and lives behind the mirrors. SnÃ¶frid has been materialized in various forms, i.e. as three life size marionette dolls, as a distillate made with different elements, such as crashed rubies, gold, amethyst, Pol Roger, etc., she has appeared in paintings, and as food.

** â€œXeniaâ€ is one of my central subjects, and deals with serving based on Caravaggioâ€™s painting â€œthe basket of fruitsâ€, which is related to ancient Roman and Hellenistic pictorial traditions mentioned in Historia Naturalis. The recurring motif in the Xenia paintings show heroine related objects, the actual drug in powder form, the poppy flower, the poppy seed capsule with or without cuttings, the syringe, the candle, the spoon.

BARBARA CASAVECCHIA and PETER BURLEIGH

Texts by Barbara Casavecchia and Peter Burleigh found somewhere in the Castle

From chapter 23

On â€œBlocks Series Intensitiesâ€ or getting lost in a castle or getting on in the internet

Digression #1:
A scroll, scrape or shred. A continuous roll of single-sided writing material: a simple plateau. Reading a scroll is a continuous singular event. You roll out you roll back in. There is no discontinuity, no block, no series, just one unit of continuous pendular rolling. Take the codex, the common form of the printed book. Now a codex generates discontinuities in the physical structuring of the content. You can jump from one point to another regardless of their position in the whole structure. In the codex, reading sequentially is merely a special case of discontinuityâ€”that is, where discontinuity tends almost to zero (the pages must be turned). The facility of the codex to fast information retrieval oversaw its supersession of the codex within two centuries in 4th to 5th century Egypt. Where the scroll is a physical text, the codex is structural. Now, a third structuration appears hypertextâ€” driven by algorithm. In its manner of reading, we find no discontinuity: a text rolls in front of us; yet every text is also intrinsically discontinuous with in-built, internalized lines of flight (possible deterritorializations), hyperlinks.

Digression #2:
A castle, a web of patterns and paths a place to get lost and ret(h)read history:

Digression #3:
â€œhe thought he (K) remembered roughly whereabouts in the corridor the door was, and decided to try opening a door that in his opinion was probably the one he wanted. The venture couldnâ€™t be too riskyâ€¦he looked to right and left down the corridor again, to see whether, after all, anyone was coming who could give him informationâ€¦ but the long corridor was quiet and empty.â€i In fact for P it is true that each block-segment has an opening or a door onto the line of the hallwayâ€”one that is usually quite far from the door or the opening of the following blockâ€”it is also true that all the blocks have back doors that are contiguousâ€¦Itâ€™s the same in two blocks on a continuous and unlimited line, with their doors far from each other, are revealed to have contiguous back doors that make the blocks themselves contiguous. And even here, weâ€™re (D&G) simplifying things: the hallway can be angled, the little door can be connected to the line of the hallway, in such a way that things become all the more surprising. The line of the hallway, the unlimited straight line, can hold other surprises, since it can connect to a certain degree with the principle of the discontinuous circle and the tower (as in the Castle, which includes a tower as well as a group of small, contiguous buildings).â€ii

Text:
Fosdinovo infectious stones: posturing, imposing, staged on a hilltop seen only from inside itself (having arrived at dusk). Inside, a circuit of meaning in the movements through around over its steps and polishes, losings and findings: voices, traces, perlocutionsâ€”where do you go, who do you find? Consequentially inconsequent: in the castle there is no going back spatially, there are only lines of confusion that in their density make tracks of sense, a creasing of footprints in hard stone and marble. But to retrace is redundant, so the castello despite its ancientness is an embodied experience of todayâ€™s algorithmic screenworld.

I sway (often) back to those days, before the viral world of internet, when we made sense by digging deep and then digging out, the same way we went in, or even the long way round. But in either case, we got back to the beginning by the way we went in or by its spatial or temporal equivalent around about. Not so now in the brotherhoodâ€™s milieu (I straddle both worlds, perhaps). In EIB there are two levels of informational architecture: actual real sets of passages, connections, thresholds crossoversâ€”here the grey silver Macworld, underlinings, mousings, jumps and leaps; and also, facing that plane the virtual flows, fluxes and dynamics of a viral world. No sense in returning, only sense in looping round and around in continuously interrupted contiguities.

There is the smell of green at one tucked slope, countered by the cursor at another incline. One may entice another.

It is potentially green anywhere, even where it doesnâ€™t permit for growth. Man holds these credentials at the least.

A search calls for actionâ€¦what are the footprints without the dirt and pebble; the scroll and stroll. A view from up above the clouds allows for better navigation, though the smell is far-reaching for any touch as such. Nevertheless, what a grand overview; block by block zones; the green pastures beneathâ€¦the city is everywhere.

How about over there.

Grounded here: it is potentially green. And the smell of the concrete curing permeates in the airâ€¦recalling the sort of gardens of childhoods. This surely is the comfort food of a collective outdoors.

No matter if the color underneath is fresh green, a checkered red-and-white, or a dubious smoky greyâ€¦

One day the Bel-Shen’Toff came in to the Kingâ€™s house, and he said: â€œMy King, all the wheat in the fields has been blighted! All the grain that we harvested this year has been infected with a fungus that turns people crazy when they eat it.â€The King thought for a moment, then said, â€œThats terrible. Truly terrible, but, If Iâ€™m going to be the King, and know how these people in my province are feelingâ€¦ Shouldnâ€™t I go crazy with them?â€ His Seer looked confused, and spoke with fear, â€œBut my King, we will go mad!!!â€The King but smiled, and spoke, â€œYes, but you and I shall make a mark upon each otherâ€™s foreheads, so when we see each other later, we will know that we chose to go crazy, while everybody else, just is.â€
(Ken Kesey, Twister, from Timothy Learyâ€™s Last trip, 1997)

This little story, often told by Ken Kesey in his shows, refers to ergot, a fungus that infected wheat and drove people mad. For someone the mention of ergot might recall those outbreak of mass hysteria like the Strasbourg Dancing Plague of 1518 or the Salem witch trial, which led to the executions of twenty people, most of them women. In Ken Keseyâ€™s shows it rather referred to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, as ergot was in fact the chemical precursor that lead Albert Hoffman to the synthesis of LSD.

The story of a king who relinquishes his power to follow the lead of untamed states of mind also pertains to a tradition of narratives of role reversal and transgression. In ancient roman times behavioural license was celebrated during a festival called Saturnalia, a forerunner of modern carnivals that introduced the suspension of slavery, of all forms of justice, of work and social distinctions. In George Batailleâ€™s studies on the notion of eroticism, the death of the king gives the signal to initiate a temporary transgression of taboos: during the critical period of decomposition of the kingâ€™s flash, transgression is as important as obedience was before, when a man â€œfeared no longer to perform publically and unrestrainedly acts which hitherto he had only performed in privateâ€. In the work of Mikhail Bakhtin the suspension of rules entailed by the notion of carnivalesque is described as â€œa continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrowningsâ€ (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 1965). In the 1980s and the 1990s, Leigh Boweryâ€™s masquerades were a similar attempt to confront conventions, celebrating monstrosity in spite of the stigma attached to homosexuality and AIDS. When the king goes mad it means that the times are ripe to swap the world of the rulers with that of criminals, prostitutes and buffoons.

â€¦the CIA was like an unwitting midwife in the birth of the acid generationâ€¦ (Marty Lee)

In 1953 the CIA started an experimentation on mental control devices for military purposes, this program was called MKUltra. â€œBetween 1955 and 1958 research was initiated by the Army Chemical Corps to evaluate the potential for LSD as a chemical warfare incapacitating agent. In the course of this research, LSD was administered [â€¦] to ascertain the effects of the drug on their ability to function as soldiers.â€ In 1963 also the British Army started experimenting with, administering trips to soldiers in order to measure their abilities under the effect of hallucinogenics.

The drug was administered in a glass of water given at the start of each dayâ€™s exercise. Twenty-five minutes later the first effects of the drug became apparent. The men begun to relax and to giggle. But this man was more seriously affected and had to be removed from the exercise. After thirty-five minutes, one of the radio operators had become incapable of using his set, and the efficiency of the rocket launcher team was also very impaired. Ten minutes later, the attacking section had lost all sense of urgency. Notice the bunching and indecision as they enter a wood occupied by the enemy. Almost immediately, the section commander tried to use a map to find the location of troop headquarters, and a prisonerâ€™s escort had to have the way pointed out to him, although it was in plain sight 700 yards away over open country. Fifty minutes after taking the drug, radio communication had become difficult, if not impossible. But the men are still capable of sustained physical effort; however, constructive action was still attempted by those retaining a sense of responsibility despite their physical symptoms. But one hour and ten minutes after taking the drug, with one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up, admitting that he could no longer control himself or his men. He himself then relapsed into laughter.
(A trial of an Incapacitating drug, 1964, Imperial War Museum, cat. nÂ° MGH 4464)

While the military potential of LSD-25 continued being researched, when the patent of the compound expired in 1962, LSD started to gain widespread popularity. â€œIn fiscal 1968, the production capacity of the clandestine laboratories seized was reported to be more than 40,000,000 doses per year.â€ (The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs, by Edward M. Brecher and the Editors of Consumer Reports Magazine, 1972.http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/CU50.html As of 1/7/2015) By the end of the 1960s, thanks also to advocates like Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey, LSD and other psychedelics were regarded by many as substances that were able to expand human consciousness.Cyberconsciousness

In his seminal book Expanded Cinema, published in 1970, Gene Youngblood argued that the art of the so-called â€˜new mediaâ€™ was taking a step towards the development of a new consciousness. â€œIt is the belief of those who work in cybernetic art that the computer is the tool that someday will erase the division between what we feel and what we see.â€ (Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 1970) Youngblood believed that the computer would evolve into an aesthetic machine or, in other words, a means to achieve a new consciousness for a new cybernetic environment. One of the sources of Expanded Cinema with regards to these ideas was the work of A. Michael Noll, a very early pioneer in digital computer art, 3D animation and tactile communication. In an article titled The digital computer as a creative medium, published in 1967, Noll conjectured the invention of a psychedelic computer interfaced with artistsâ€™ psyche: â€œAlthough this might seem somewhat exotic [â€¦], the artistâ€™s emotional state might conceivably be determined by computer processing of physical and electrical signals from the artist (for example, pulse rate and electrical activity of the brain). Then, by changing the artistâ€™s environment through such external stimuli as sound, color, and visual patterns, the computer would seek to optimize the aesthetic effect of all these stimuliâ€. Further down Noll continued: â€œOne is strongly tempted to describe these ideas as a consciousness-expanding experience in association with a psychedelic computer!â€ (A. Michael Noll, The digital computer as a creative medium, 1967).

Colonising mental spaces

October, 1989
VPL Research laboratories, San Francisco Bay Area

A man in a room is testing a virtual reality system, consisting of a head-mounted display and a computer interfaced glove. His gaze, directed somewhere on the wall, is lost inside the hardware of the computer that sits next to him. What he sees is replicated on a screen, directions are duplicated, disoriented. Objects occupy multiple positions. One reality is swapped with another. His hands speak an occult language, making things happen with incomprehensible gestures, speaking to invisible entities, pointing at void patches of space in the room. The posture of the man betrays utter unawareness of physical space, his attitude is that of a tripster wandering around a rave party. For the first time the human body is an outcast, the mind being sucked away by non-spatial realities made of electronic circuits. October 1989 San Francisco Bay Area, one month before the fall of the Berlin wall, thousands kilometres away. What could be the language for the politics of an electronic out-of-body experience? Is it true that freedom of movement might soon have the extension of psychological introspection? Will freedom of expression be just a matter of mental dexterity?

The octopus

One of the possibilities offered by virtual reality systems is that of morphing, that is to say to change at will the shape of the body of an avatar. In other words, imagine you could be an octopus, you could move eight tentacles, imagine you could change colour and guise, you could speak and you could display images on your body at the speed of thought. Imagine that when you get bored of being an octopus you could just morph into the shape of a lobster or of a bucket, for that matters. To explain the potential of morphing, Jaron Lanier, a VR researcher and founder of VPL Research, often refers to cephalopods.

As a researcher who studies virtual reality, I can tell you exactly what emotion floods through me when I watch cephalopods morph: jealousy.The problem is that in order to morph in virtual reality, humans must design morph-ready avatars in laborious detail in advance. Our software tools are not yet flexible enough to enable us, in virtual reality, to improvise ourselves into different forms.[â€¦]when it comes to visual communication, and other modalities such as smell and spontaneously enacted sculptural shapes that could be felt, we are hamstrung.We can learn to draw and paint, or use computer graphics design software, but we cannot generate images at the speed with which we can imagine them.Suppose we had the ability to morph at will, as fast as we can think. What sort of language might that make possible? Would it be the same old conversation, or would we be able to â€œsayâ€ new things to one another?
(Jaron Lanier, You are not a gadget, 2010)

Lanierâ€™s interest in morphing is linked to the vision of a so called post symbolic communication. One of the envisioned possibilities offered by virtual reality would be to change the shape of our avatars, in order to communicate not anymore through symbols, words, and ideograms but by actually morphing our virtual alter-egos into what we want to communicate. These ideas about cephalopods were first formulated not by Lanier but by the psychedelic bard Terence McKenna, in an article published on the magazine Magical Blend after a visit to Lanierâ€™s VPL Research labs.

I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus.This is because the cephalopods, the squids and octopi, have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic, a model for the communications of the future. In the not-too-distant future, men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea. [â€¦] In the world of the octopus, to behold is to understand.
(Terence K. McKenna, Virtual reality and electronic highs, or: On becoming virtual octopi, in Magical Blend, 1990)

In a talk he delivered in 1992, Terence McKenna further elaborated on this concepts.

The importance of virtual reality, as I see it, is [that] it is a technology that will allow us to show each other our dreams. We will be able to build structures in the imagination that we cannot now share with each other. I imagine a world where children begin to build their virtual realities they are five, six, seven. By the time they are twenty these virtual realities might be, practically speaking, the size of Manhattan. Well, then what real intimacy will mean is saying to someone â€œWould you like to visit my world?â€ My world with my visions, my values, my dreams, my fears. In a sense, what virtual reality is, is a strategy to let us turn ourselves inside out. So that we see each otherâ€™s minds. You know octopi wear their minds on the outside of their bodies. Octopi communicate by changing colors and the smoothness of their bodies: they wear their meaning. We have an organ that we can do this with but itâ€™s very limited: itâ€™s called the face.

The research of a new consciousness, of both cybernauts and psychonauts, is the vision of unlimited understanding of reality, where inner and outer worlds blend together, where subjective perceptions and objective conditions are interchangeable notions. It exposes the will for an absolute capacity in the manipulation of symbols, a transgression of normative language which is at once the manipulation of a shared reality and of its multiple perceptions. It is a story of sentiments and visions of a world that is not just given to the human mind, but moulded by it. To the extent to which this story might speak of superior powers that arenâ€™t available to us, it is a narrative of wizardry or, at least, of psychological alchemy.

Manipulating reality

The Wizard of Earthsea is a book written in 1968 by Ursula K. Le Guin, a radical science fiction and fantasy writer, quasi-anarchist, environmentalist, and taoist. It is one of the book that I most loved in my life. I read it over and over during my childhood, while listening countless times to Freddie Mercuryâ€™s songs, which in my mind I still associate with fairies, kings, queens, dragons, and magic. The Wizard of Earthsea is the story of a man called Ged, a dragonlord and Archmage, protagonist of many epic songs. The novel tells the story of his youth, in a world where magic is a form of natural speech: wizardry consists in the manipulation of language and sorcerers are those who know the true names of things and beings. In this world, the secret tongue of magic literally speaks the essence of objects, animals and humans. Magic is manipulating symbols, the juggling of the true names which shape and determine the innermost principles of reality. The psychedelic undertones of this language are exposed to the reader when Ged first encounters the Archmage Nemmerle and has with him a conversation through a non-symbolic psychological sensorium.

As their eyes met, a bird sang aloud in the branches of the tree. In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves: it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.Then that moment passed, and he and the world were as before, or almost as before.[â€¦]The Archmage looked at Ged and looked away, and began to speak in a tongue that Ged did not understand, mumbling as will an old old man whose wits go wandering among the years and islands. Yet in among his mumbling there were words of what the bird had sung and what the water had said falling. He was not laying a spell and yet there was a power in his voice that moved Gedâ€™s mind so that the boy was bewildered, and for an instant seemed to behold himself standing in a strange vast desert place alone among shadows. Yet all along he was in the sunlit court, hearing the fountain fall.
(Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wizard of Earthsea, 1968)

She refused to bow down to the rules of the convent and become a nun, although her parents imprisoned her within its walls.

Aloisia clothes her passionate love that she refused to renounce in a cardinalâ€™s red vestments, centuries after her family failed to redeem her

Someone has been moving about in the castle for a long time, talking playfully about the codes of conduct that constricted her,

as though to exorcise the shadowy memory of the unfortunate girl and to return to the so-called friendly network of â€œthe eternal internet brotherhood.â€

The coexistence of Institutional container and network content, of signifier and meaning, demonstrate that within real creative coexistence, the instruments and Â technology of freedom and the rules/regulations that are imposed cancel each other out in a fraternal dialogue.

Itâ€™s an interesting thought, that a historical memory changes continuously as people attempt to reconstruct past events which are obscure and spiral away in the light of past generations. Itâ€™s difficult to share every individual experience, often as difficult and unpleasant as jumping off an initial cliff but, like giving birth, the result is often a pleasant surprise. For example the red blood of the bull fight becomes a barbarous sharing between spectator and spectacle.

How can we exorcise a terrifying yet exciting popular custom without cancelling the end result?

Perhaps by sharing something positive, in a safe, neutral environment, using external stimuli to bring about a new consciousness about life experience and past events.

For a soul of serenity and creativity.
For a soul that will liberate our eternal â€œattached virtual deviceâ€: the unconscious.
New desires can surface. New pleasures can be posessed. New ideas can be projected.
Sometimes our souls are the tombs of our desires.
We live in a ruin of pleasure haunted by ghosts such as fear, boredom and suppression.
But One could begin to think about an another life, to live the â€œhereâ€ and â€œnowâ€
and escape the nightmare of this spinning mental grinder.

For sometime now, the brothers have been programming
a format located in nature beyond machines and simulations.
This format is surrounded by a new reality that transitions
from an augmented chaos to an omnipresent supermind,
from a cybercentric narcissism to a hyper-lucid extropism,
from a techno-buraucratic lifestyle to a noospheric realness.

During this gathering we will all be provided the theme to become
nobility of a kingdom where a new architecture of emotions
will materialize in the forms of art, poetry and therapy.

We will navigate our souls from
the Dungeons of the subconscious to the Throne of the supraliminal.
Inferno will become Purgatory and Purgatory will become Paradiso.
We aspire to achieve a mental and aesthetic transformation.
We could acquire this state of meta-magic with the
fundamental psychic stages of eating, drinking and sleeping.

The site of this operation is the medieval Castle of Malaspina in Fosdinovo, Tuscany
where Dante Alighieri spent his exile. It will start the 6th of July 2015.

The password to enter this portal is: The Eternal Internet Brotherhood.

Angelo Plessas:Â Do you have an after-effect or after-thought after the Eternal Internet Brotherhood?

Danai Anesiadou:Â We either go in front of our computer we go to our computer and have a thought or two then we text go and have a coffee gossip a little. Buy groceries come back home and donâ€™t feel like cooking. Smoke a cigarette think of our usual problems or if we donâ€™t think we are having any go to the Internet read the guardian gather problems get frustrated perhaps. Then if we feel we are engaged we gather them frustrations and link them to our own frustrations go back to the studio eating a snickers merging with what material all conceptual work we had Lala Lala Lala. Go back home and take a shower make yourself beautiful like you are a female character in a Jane Austen novel go to the ball with the renewed and pumped up excitement that you will meet the Prince talk to the curator hope to be inspired by the work although you are not planning to be because you have been disappointed so many times before or if youâ€™re having a weak solar plexus combined with introspection and the willingness to be good u secretly hope the show will suck because envy is not part of your vocabulary. the opening the opening might also be the biennial, you have been traveling Â for many hours u feel so international did you pay the ticket yourself. You meet your friends and eat Thai food because there is no good Thai in Athens Â and have the same conversation that art fairs are the new biennials and continue talking about game of thrones instead of the expo. Shock shock Iâ€™m shocked he punched his eyes through his skull and I was alone to watch it. Who are those people making game of thrones. I want to meet them. Art fairs are no places for artists but filled with artworks so who is making all those artworks. Humans going on the Internet ordering wood reading books reading online magazines going to the opening breaking up with their girlfriends eating sneakers on trains having meetings with galleries dreaming of doing things different, I want to be on the beach right now Or having a solo show Lala Lala Lala.
And then there is Angelos eternal Internet brotherhood or the red wedding of art which is absolutely non of the above.

Siri my loyal transcribster does not register commas and question marks only fullstops.

Andreas Angelidakis: This is a really important building, itâ€™s Zvi Heckerâ€™s Ramot housing and itâ€™s important because first its one of the few examples of Metabolist architecture as itâ€™s translated from Japan to Israel. Metabolist architecture was designed on an idea that buildings are organic and they grow and evolve. But this particular building did not evolve to the architectâ€™s wishes it evolved according to a user customization, people just altered the building according to how they wanted so this is kind of uncontrolled metabolism and I think its interesting because user customization is completely a thing of the time of the internet. So itâ€™s interesting to look how this design that was meant to evolve changed its course of evolution according to the user customization.

Elcin Pia Joyner: I have been dealing with sculpture and materials for a long time now and at one point I started studying Buddhism and Sanskrit I realized that the word for â€œthingâ€ in Sanskrit also means an event. So â€œthingâ€ and â€œeventâ€ for them is the same thing. The reason for that is every single material in this world made of these particles and they vibrate and they hold themselves together and they create this entity which is not static. Even a piece of rug or marble or wood they all make all these particles and they vibrate. I came to the realization that sculpture actually is not a static entity, its not something you shape and it stands by itself, you put on pedestal and you exhibit in a museum, sculpture is not like that. At the same time I was practicing yoga and I realized that my body is also an event than aesthetic entity and I started dealing with the idea of yoga as a sculpture. When I take a posture it is a piece of sculpture, which is a dynamic sculpture and the process in between is very much like shaping the body moving the body becomes its own event and its own sculpture. So this is my practice right now dealing yoga as a process of art.

Jean Kay

Golden #Etinterbro Question to Jean Kay writer, by Angelo Plessas

Angelo Plessas:Â Why you hate the internet?

Jean Kay:Â i have accessÂ to so many thoughts that itâ€™s hard to have my own

Che Zara Blomfield:Â I think about this in relation to the Duchamp and him proposing the Fountain to be exhibited. It put life into art, not just a depiction of life. Now life is more artistic, the developed world has cameras attached to their phones. 6 billion have access to mobile phones, about 90% of the worlds population. I think the blurring between whats art and what isnâ€™t will continue, along with who sees it and how they perceive it. I hope art will continue to adapt to the mediums available. What it looks like wonâ€™t be importantâ€¦ but how it engages its audience.

Meir Kordevani: My conception of the kibbutz is a group of people gathering together and sharing responsibility but also benefits together. Nobody owes everything, everybody shares everything together. Then there is the burden of the living is divided by everyone. Everybody can also find time to accomplish who they are in this system

Angelo Plessas:Â Why you did you choose to do the horse back riding for the Eternal Internet Brotherhood?

Mia Lundstrom: First off, horses are a true passion in my life. I wanted to create an opportunity for all participants in the Eternal Internet Brotherhood to share this with me. And of course with the horses.

Horses are very intelligent and sensitive creatures which enables individual experiences on a deeper spiritual level for anyone that is open to it. There is no hierarchy or â€œfiltersâ€ in the communication between horses and should not prevail between horse and human. For example, there is a saying that your horse mirrors your soul, sometimes you like what you see sometimes you donâ€™t.

The experience we shared had a wonderful mix of ingredients that relationships with horses can add on to the taste of life; power, speed, wind, nature, beauty, spirit. Framed by the Dead Sea desert landscape, it was a delight and a true joy to observe. To sum up, the language of horses can teach us a lot about ourselves and enrich us as individuals as well as our diverse artistic practices, although it takes time. Introducing horses during the residency was an appetizer to broaden the understanding of horses and nature as well as a more profound understanding of our being.

CommunityBoxes are small and localised PopUp internet Â hubs. They offer
sharing data/information Only within a specific physical location.

In the Eternal Internet Brotherhood Dead-Sea instance, we exchanged artistic data/digitalÂ materials viaÂ communityÂ boxesÂ between artists in Palestine and residentsÂ of theÂ Eternal Internet Brotherhood. These exchanges are only located in the physical area,Â allowing future visitors in the area Â to experience the art materials theyÂ store/archive.

During the Eternal Internet Brotherhood we made different night activities such as â€œGuess the Art Manifestoâ€ and different games to meet each other better. Our activities also included lectures such as the one in the photo done from LA based artist Gil Kuno. (photos Andreas Angelidakis and Anastasios Logothetis)

The second Eternal Internet Brother/Sisterhood Promo used in crowdfunding platforms

Athens, 28th January 2013

The 1st Eternal Internet Brotherhood happened in the summer of 2012. It was a cooperative camp between artists, curators and writers that took place on the greek island of Anafi. A mystical island located on the edge of the Cyclades, used in ancient times as an â€œinterfaceâ€ for mythological adventures.

This year the 2nd Eternal Internet Brotherhood will take place in Mexico. It will host artists, writers and thinkers who will pass by the sacred ancient Atzec soil of the pyramid of Tepotzlan culminating in the surrealist park of Las Posas.Â The choice of the annual site is based always on the idea that ancient mythologies can network our contemporary condition.

During the Eternal Internet Brothehood we all stay and work closely in a common mental and/or physical environment, and we organically create new concepts swarmed by data, dreams, feelings, knowledge, visions and sounds.

The Eternal Internet Brotherhood is an experiment and a situation. A quest for an union of all disciplines where the creative offline and metaphysical online modes of well-being spark a liberated intellectual evolution. No discipline or mode will replace one another but intertwine with each other.

In our days the internet is a place where new realities take form as we encounter innumerable images and stimuli. Internet browsing is seducing,

itâ€™s a perpetual quest for new fantasies both visual and conceptual and I believe it is our gateway to freedom and escape. It should not be misguided as a tool but more as a structure against hierarchies and social conventions.

We are all entering a new phase, a phase of a unity maintaining intelligent behaviors that emerge from online and virtual interactions while promoting the power of imagination as we progress from one sphere to another. The Eternal Internet Brotherhood aspires to form new narratives under this scheme. Between digital ecstasis and real-time social complexity, from connectedness to dislocation all embraced with the soulâ€™s reunion with the perfection of nature.Â All beyond perceptions of literal and limited use of technology.

It is the time we change in essence and form the way we work away from lethargic and tedious manners. We artists and writers ought to transcend this. One of the first things to be done is to come closer to nature, with or without our machines. We should work by nature, copy, reproduce or just enjoy it as the perfect interface.

For this operation we will use every medium and cross disciplinary practice focusing, extending, evaluating on the themes of distribution, materiality, human interaction and well-being.

The new interface is called INFINITE —¯ Webring of the Eternal Internet Brotherhood is neo-archaic, semi-random navigation system hand-coded and chain-linked by PWR Studio in the â‚¬uro-zone in August 2013. A never-ending loop within the complex coils of the society of control. No Menu. No index.

No Happy Endings: A Post-Private Massage, an essay by Zak Stone for #ETINTERBRO

.
When you’re flirting with someone you have to be very aggressive, he told me
after. You have to show them that you want to make them yours. But, at the same
time, that you don’t give a shit.
We were observing the locals—a young couple giving their son a swimming lesson
by the waterfall—while chatting about privacy, about whether or not it’s
disappearing.
Is a post-private world futuristic or nostalgic?
My thoughts: Outside our specific worldview, privacy is hazy. Parents, family,
neighbors, watch, listen, ogle you eating, breastfeeding, screaming. They give
feedback.
Only those who are free can get bothered about privacy. It’s a prestigious right.
In Southern Arizona border patrol agents have erected outposts on the northern
side of the border. “Are you on American citizen? Are you an American citizen?”
they ask drivers commuting through the desert.
Video phone in hand, privacy activists drive their cars up to the checkpoints, stop,
roll down the window, and then—when asked the routine question—refuse to
answer, press ‘record.’
The community of activists (it’s a straight-white- guy thing) posts their defiance to
YouTube. It’s for privacy’s sake (not for immigrants’).
They get lots of hits.
Both those who aren’t like them experience privacy differently.
The family swimming in front of us may occupy a realm that’s maybe pre- or post
private, to which we are just returning or arriving, he suggests. (We’re staring at
them.)
My thought: We who have privacy are choosing to give it up, and we should do so
proudly.
We ascend the castle and the massage begins. His hands press my back while I
think about shame and fucking, about sex and love, and what I look like now on
the ground, and how it feels to be watched.
A women’s voice monotonously describes the loneliness of a beautiful place in my
ears through headphones. Nature’s beauty is lonely because nature defies our

urge to be transactional. You can’t fuck nature. You can’t pay it. Its beauty leaves
us isolated, cold.
We put pressure on natural places to do things to us. To change us, to give our
thoughts silence (privacy), to allow us an escape. But there is no longer an escape,
even here.
It’s always just the village.
By the waterfall, the little boy from Xilitla had stared back at us, swimming ten
feet away from his parents who are in love and distracted. His mom is chubby;
she looks up at her man. He’s climbed the waterfall and straddles the stream of
water and cups his hands in front of him to outline a heart and looks down at her.
He wants attention.
I tell the little boy ‘mira a tu papa.’ He keeps his eyes trained on us.
Nature’s the same as the massage – you can’t fuck a massage. There’s no orgasm.
You don’t come, but this person’s touch is meant to change you. The body is a
meat that the masseur tenderizes, and eventually—there’s a result, there’s matter
that’s changed: a resorting of particles.
The process is designed for a closed environment. Highly controlled, an
experiment but intimate. It’s meant to be private. We play Eastern music and
modify the lighting.
On our date before the massage, we swam, and I took a picture of him in the
waterfall with my iPhone 5, and it looked like he was climbing up to heaven—the
overexposed sky was white above him from the sun – and he thought the picture
was cheesy, but then again, why does it have to feel cheesy when something’s just
nice—
And then my grandmother texted with details about picking me up from the
airport on Friday, that You Do have Togo thru customs. It is in terminal 4. I will
meet you there. Text me just before take off and also when. You land. Haveagood
flight.
It’s an interruption into a moment that could be romantic. Or it’s just business or
it’s just friendship between two lustful men: one older, smooth, light, European,
who performs; the other younger, tanner, American, who records.
The text in my ears is taken from personal journals he kept on a 90-day retreat to
a beach in Crete. It was an effort to condense his artistic mission into a digestible
paragraph (for the galleries) while he can take a more interesting, less-directed
path—hiding behind the clarity of his own statement.

He says his work deals with exploring his own femininity. “A hetero-male
feminism.”
He’s performed this routine since last February on people from the art world—in
a reconverted church somewhere in Brooklyn. But the performance has a
different sensibility in Las Pozas, in open space—where I can hear tourists
stepping over my body, spread across a towel on one of Edward James’s many
bridges to nowhere.
One ought to feel freer here, but I’m told my back is tense, just like the New York
gallerists’. (I’ve out-smoked them in cigarettes here too, and out-frustrated them
sexually.)
I’ve wanted a hand to touch me but have it go beyond what’s going on right now,
to own someone, to get intimate. Because isn’t that what’s supposed to happen in
beautiful, private places.
When you’re flirting with someone you have to be very aggressive. You have to
show them that you want to make them yours. But at the same time, that you
don’t give a shit.
But when you’re facedown on the towel, you have no choice. You’re already his.
* * *

â€œThe Narco, The Prepper and The Proto-Transhumanistâ€ by Theo Michael for #ETINTERBRO

After watching a few hours of Â TrecartinÂ videos on vimeo, I understood I wanted to do something a bit more anti-internet. But then I thought of the cliche question between internet artists: â€œIs there life outside the internet?â€ The cliche answer is no, but I didnâ€™t want to pronounce it. Yet I could certainly say that there is death outside the internet. Internet, being the developing nervous system of humanity,

gathers memories and is thus seen by many as a contraption that leads to immortality. â€œHey, my face shows Â up on Google search, Iâ€™m quasi-immortal.â€ Every personal device connected on the internet is the equivalent of a neuron, with Google servers being thick neural clusters and the arrival of supercomputers and superintelligence will signify the Â beginning of humanityâ€™s collective brain. Kurzweil says all that will be reality by late 21st century and hopes that he will be uploaded and backed up. We are all waiting for the Singularity.

On the other hand I prefer something more subtle, like an old fashioned burial of a time capsule in a forest every once in a while. So I put a shovel in the car the other day and drove off. Halfway to the forest I realized that if anyone saw me digging a hole in the middle of nowhere heâ€™d think I â€™m carrying a dead body. What if he was there to bury someone for real?Thatâ€™s Mexico letâ€™s not forget. The country with a high ratio of illicit burials per capita. It should be a fast digging job. No one should see me.

Another feeling that crept up was that of theÂ doomsday prepper. Was I trying to capitalize on the possibility ofÂ the internetâ€™s demise? If a co-ordinated attack on major data centers and cables took place, then what? Or whatÂ about an attack on all major electricity generators? Then almost everything anyone is doing today is futile. Then Â sealed packages like mine could prove important if found as they would be almost perfectly preserved. How manyÂ people go around burying stuff double and triple wrapped in plastic containers? After all, goods made today are flimsy

and ephemeral and will degrade fast. Most skyscrapers of today will have to be demolished in 100 years max. Most stuff is recycled. Imagine the archaeologist that will find a fossilized ipad. No apps there, innit! Of course by that time the

pyramids will still be there. Ancient peoples understood eternity better it seems. Finally entombing people or objects is a type of proto-transhumanism. Why do you try to preserve something if not because you believe that this something will

transcend all existing somethings? Deep inside we think that buried people will be resurrected one day. It says it in the bible, theÂ transhumanist mormonsÂ believe in it too. With this type of nonsensical thoughts in mind I proceeded with caution,

dug a one meter deep hole, placed the package, filled back the soil and covered up the traces of the act. It was a good day.

Theo Michael

CeCILE B. EVANS and YURI PATTISON

Welcome to the Wangjaesan, an interactive video by Cecile B. Evans and Yuri Pattison for #ETINTERBRO

The Wangjaesan Art Troupe is a dance company that makes regularly scheduled appearances on the DPRK national television station. The tags were compiled through found sources and answer forum responses to questions about rain, the color orange, forever, and the future. This is part of an on-going research about North Korean culture.

When the spinning info icon appears, click on the icon to view the tags

Liberté, égalité, fraternité – The Workings of Brotherhood in the Age of the Web

This may be irrelevant, but when I hear the term “brotherhood” I first think about the “Aryan Brotherhood”. The “Aryan Brotherhood” is a neo-Nazi organization, about which I once saw an episode of “Gangland”. “Gangland” is a TV-series on the “History Channel”. On TV, they said the “Aryan Brotherhood” was one of the most violent of all prison gangs. Then, I think about commander – was that his rank? – Kane and his “Brotherhood of NOD”, the evil faction in 1995’s real time strategy blockbuster “Command and Conquer”. Kane, the leader of this sinister brotherhood had a baldhead and wore leather. The logo of his crew was the tail of a scorpion on a red background. The movies that Imdb lists under the search term “brotherhood” are all either about similar dark cults or about brothers who grew apart, such as the 2006–2008 TV series “Brotherhood”, which – according to the plot summary – “reflects around two brothers on opposite sides of the law: one a gangster and the other a politician.”

It feels almost redundant to mention Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, Richard I the Lionheart and John Lackland of England, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Brian Wilson and his “Beach Boy”-Brothers. Practically all the famous brothers hated each other. Brotherhood, in spite of the term’s somehow positive associations with community, is essentially a dark thing.

But that was too fast. Before I come back to the problem of individual evil, let’s talk about violence and evil in a larger scale, the grand narrative. By the end of the 18th century, the broad availability of firearms has led to the French Revolution – overall a catastrophe, bringing about not only the terror of the guillotines and Napoleon, but most of all the rule of the bourgeoisie, which was in some ways – the hells of the 20th century proof it – even worse than what it replaced.

In spite of the devastating effects of this failed revolution of 1789, which still can be felt today, it must be considered one of the most radical undertakings in human history, only comparable to the total transformation of everyday life by the Russian avant-garde before Stalin imposed the kitschness of dictatorship upon esthetic progress. The sans-culottes and others not only wanted to overthrow the proverbially rotten French aristocracy, but also were seeking to built a new society, a society based on the new, secular values liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Invoking this baguette-ish triad seems inevitable when talking about brotherhood and therefore all too trivial at first sight. It is no coincidence that contemporary French neoliberal populist philosophers such as André Glucksmann and Paul Thibaud both were giving unctuous elaborations on this matter. And who has ever been to France will hate nothing more than this kind of revolutionary kitsch that also fuels the so called “radical” left of the country, most of all Alain Badiou, who loves to proclaim “la revolution” from his recess in an elite university.

Something though, is in spite of all that remarkable in the triad liberté, égalité, fraternité: To come straight to the point, it says “brotherhood” not “sisterhood”. Why is that so? Surprisingly, there are not many people who even thought about this. One of the few exceptions is Belgian art historianThierry de Duve in his essay “Humains, encore un effort si vous voulez être post-chrétiens!”: To de Duve, who is otherwise a remarkable thinker, the use of “brotherhood” is a hint for the sexism of the French Revolution, which, especially in the juxtaposition to the sacralisation of female figures such as the Marianne, proves that all ideas of the French revolution are ultimately phallo-, logo- and whatever-centric.

Of course, that is exactly the kind of bullshit post-deconstructivist and meta-modern approaches have to get rid off. De Duve, otherwise brilliant, is just projecting his own mindset on other epochs in this case. He ultimately criticizes the French Revolution for its inherent sexism that he locates in the fact that 18th century rhetoric didn’t include the gender-neutral formulations of today’s campuses. He implicitly alleges that the French revolutionaries didn’t know better, that they in fact wanted to say “humanity” or “solidarity”, but their sexist subconscious spoiled this certain wish. There is no more naïve and self-righteous way to misunderstand historical speech acts.

The French of the 18th century were probably not aware that “brotherhood” involved an exclusion of gender. They had drafted a “Declaration de droits de l’homme”, which was gender neutral, in spite the word “homme” literally means “man” in the gender sense – just like the English word. In fact, the constitution of 1791 uses the notion of brotherhood in direct relation to a gender-neutral “homme”, when it says: “Men (hommes) of all countries are brothers (frères), he who oppresses one nation declares himself the enemy of all.” It is therefore most likely, that the “fraternité” doesn’t only imply men.

Nevertheless, “fraternité” is not simply a gender-neutral form of “solidarity” or “humanity”. The revolutionaries could have used the gender neutral terms “humanité” or “solidarité”, if they really would have wanted to express that. Both words do rhyme with “egalité” and “liberté” and there were many different versions of the slogan liberté, égalité, fraternité circulating. Replacing one term was a real possibility.

So, why “brotherhood”? What separates the members of a brotherhood from those of a sisterhood besides the bearing or non-bearing of the typical sexual organs – which is most likely anyway not the way how a 18th century person would have understood gender differences? Why is “brotherhood” not “sisterhood”, in a political sense? What is the real difference between both concepts?

I mentioned it before. First of all, it needs to be noted that the brothers in classical narratives all hate each other. This phenomenon also exists concerning sisters, but it surely is stronger with brothers. It is almost hard to choose where to begin. Cain and Abel. Osiris and Seth. Romulus and Remus. Richard I the Lionheart and John Lackland of England. Heinrich and Thomas Mann. Where brothers clash, there is often blood. And being competitors for elderly love and heritage, they clash almost everywhere. The relation between really existing brothers is in fact, the opposite of solidarity.

This is an even more interesting fact, since – in spite the hatred between real brothers being trivial and everyday life knowledge – one still associates “brotherhood” with “solidarity”. And we rarely even think about real brothers when we think about “brotherhood”. Two brothers are relatives, but they almost never form a bond of “brotherhood”.

On the other hand, a “brotherhood” is a somewhat mythical, undefined threat to an outsider from the realm of fairytales and conspiracy theories. A “brotherhood” will have its symbols, its liturgy, it’s “secret knowledge”. In one sentence: a brotherhood is folklore and kitsch.

In the juxtaposition of these two implications of brotherhood, one can easily recognize a paradoxical coincidence. The impossibility of real, blood-based brotherhood on the one hand and the hysteric, kitsch concept of brotherhood as secret society on the other. In spite of being the opposite, both notions exactly presuppose each other. There is something so deeply virtual and unreal in the term brotherhood as solidarity that it can only be expressed by the means of a hysteric narrative.

The political notion of a brotherhood – the specific community that brotherhood describes – therefore doesn’t most importantly imply a form of solidarity, but precisely the virtuality of solidarity. When the French citoyensacted with the legitimacy of a “brotherhood”, they acted as individuals in the name of a fictive universal community, which – especially because it obviously doesn’t consist of genetic brothers – at the same time acknowledges its own virtuality. If Kant’s philosophy is the philosophy of the “As-if” – and this fictional approach is precisely the strength of it – then the brotherhood is the community of the “As-if”. The individual acting in the name of a brotherhood, any brotherhood, is like the individual acting in the name of the categorical imperative: acting in the name of the “As-if”. As in Kant’s categorical imperative, it is not the content that is important, but only the form.

It is precisely the fiction of the “As if”, which opens up the space of the universal within the limited sphere of the concrete: a possibility that would be less universal if “brotherhood” described a real existing institution. Mathematics is one path to the universal, fiction another. They both happen in a situation where the individual is directly connected to the universal, without institutional middlemen. There might be an institution that doesn’t recognize that 2+2 = 4, but every individual, especially in liberty, will always come to the same conclusion. Narratives, if not obstructed by institutions, do work in a similar way, although their truth is existential, not formal.

A brotherhood is – like a tribe – what Lévi-Strauss calls a “zero institution”. It is an institution with neither function nor meaning. Neither does it represent a shared understanding, nor an assumption, nor a shared concrete narrative. Rather, it is just a common, empty “as if” that can take on any concrete narrative or meaning. As such, every individual ultimately decides the meaning of it, but it can serve as a basis for individual actions performed with reference to a fictive community.

It is interesting to recall the brilliant essay “Why the Net is not a Public Sphere” by Jodi Dean, in which Dean argues that the net is such a “zero institution”, since it forms a global discourse and a global sense of community without any concretely existing global community. This paradoxical situation for example leads to the bizarre, clearly untrue idea that “the net” or the “internet community” had one voice, as newspapers and TV often say. The net itself is a fertile ground for infinite brotherhoods with their manifold shibboleths of youth- and nerd-culture. But it also produces a sense of universality in regard to its form, in regard to common, merely technical interests and the common fight against laws such as CISPA or SOPA. The space of the web, as Dean argues, is precisely not a public sphere, but something different. A space in which neither arguments are exchanged, nor consensuses are found, nor people represented: a space instead, in which the logic of representation is exchanged for the logic of action under an individually formulated universal narrative.

This end of representation is precisely what makes a brotherhood so politically powerful and so disquieting. Anonymous or the Mexican#yosoy132 are such brotherhoods. Everybody can claim to act in their name. The Rosicrucians in the 17th century, aka “Fraternity of the most Laudable Order of the Rosy Cross”, were such a brotherhood. Their Invisible Collegewas fictional. Their founder, Christian Rosenkreutz, never existed. One of their most sacred texts, the Corpus Hermeticum, was a forgery. Nevertheless, they formed the seed of the Royal Society, which revolutionized science by universalizing it, by detaching it from concrete institutions and binding it to the individual and its own judgment.

This notion of the “Invisible College” or the “Invisible Church” has been influential throughout occidental history. As Carl Schmitt writes in his essay on “The visibility of the Church”, Christianity includes the possibility, that in times of exception, the times of the parousial presence of the divine, the individual has to bypass all institutions and to seek its own relation to the universal. It is important however to remember Kierkegaard here, who clarified that the individual can only find such a privileged path to the universal inasmuch as it is itself an exception to the universal. The individual can only relate to the universal in the form of understanding itself as an exception to the universal – and by doing so, at the same time affirming and revoking the universality of the universal.

Similar is the relation of the individual to the brotherhood. The universal can only be fictively invoked as an exception, as a kitsch narrative that at the same time as it is invoked, questions its own legitimacy. It is the big advantage of a brotherhood that it ultimately cannot and never could be taken seriously. In these terms, one has to understand the triad: liberté, égalité, fraternité. Freedom and equality are such absurd, unrealistic ideals that they can only be understood within the framework of the fictive, unreal community of a broken universal that is exceptional and only includes exceptions.

Johannes Thumfart

BRENNA MURPHY

JOE HAMILTON

The Sacrifice, by Joe Hamilton (video) #ETINTERBRO

JASPER SPICERO

Designer’s Bowl from Winter by Jasper Spicero for #ETINTERBRO

Designer’s Bowl from Winter is a prop from a concept film or video game about a designer named Gordon. Gordon designed the bowl as a memorial to a nervous breakdown he had in the winter time where he smashed all of the ceramic bowls, plates and mugs in his kitchen.

computer generated 3D work inspired by the synesthetic experience as personified by trans-dimensionalÂ entities that representÂ an expanded perception that we strive towards in our exploration of rituals, technology, psychedelics and creativity

An idea to digitally sketch
portraits of some people who areÂ attending the Eternal Internet Brotherhood at different intervals based on photos theyÂ take of themselves or of each other when feeling these 3 emotions:

Voids is a non-deterministic web animation that presents a large collection of image search results for the term â€œvoidâ€. They appear through another procedural collective, a group of moving reveals which obey the rules of flock dynamics. The images come from games, artist portfolios, desktop backgrounds, astronomy, topology, and elsewhere, representing a communally generated, algorithmically filtered stab in the dark at a fundamentally elusive notion.